Friday, July 25, 2008

Our senior editor and our art editor have just returned from their honeymoon in the ancient world, and we are back! We look forward to catching up on the recent Dante's Heart correspondence - the submissions and kind letters that arrived while we were away are like a pile of gifts waiting.

You can expect to find some of our art editor's photography from this trip before long at Seaelven Studios...so keep an eye there. The photo above is actually one of mine, an amateur click from my digital - the ruins of the church of St. John just outside the remains of Ephesus in modern Turkey. By the way, we were startled to learn that of the Temple of Artemis Ephesiae, once the largest temple in the Greek world and one of the seven wonders, only a single pillar remains. One pillar!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

With great joy, our senior editor and our art editor married each other this week in a beautiful wedding at the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colorado. So as a good part of our staff are about to leave for a honeymoon, the Dante's Heart blog will be quiet for perhaps two weeks. We hope that you'll take these moments to enjoy our archives, and that you'll visit our journal.

Daniel and Jessica Fusch will be honeymooning in Greece and Italy, and hope to bring back a few wondrous stories from that part of the world.

The Importance of Wonder and Wonder Stories

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. (G. K. Chesterton)

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. (Albert Einstein)

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. (Marie Curie)

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. (G. K. Chesterton)

The experience of wonder continually reminds us that our grasp of the world is incomplete. (Stephen Greenblatt)

It was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. (Aristotle)

Benediction

This is not a gray world.

May your days be alive with the electrifying colors of God's presence and wonder.

May you look up and around you even in the midst of your burdens.

May you look for God's love in the faces around you, in the falling of rain, in the sound of footsteps in snow.

May you take in the colors of the life God gives you until your eyes and spirit ache with them.

May you be as a bride seeing in every hour the face of her Beloved.

May your wonder make the colors visible to those who walk with their heads down.

May your surprised joy and your devotion make the voice of God audible to those who walk with their pain loud in their ears.